Dots, Snapshots, Frames, Panes, Stories, Comedies
by tami3
Summary: Three stories of a child and a parent. Even if they are really only apprentice and master, sister and brother, foster-son and foster-father, the parent must love his child, no matter how much pain comes from how differently he or she sees the world.


Dots and Snapshots

It was terrible to have such a well-honed mind, and all those dots in front of him.

They did have a homeland. They had come from it together. And in that sun-drenched land, in which the sky came in abstract shape cutouts and only two colors (white glare between the nimbus fluff, gray clouds dim from the light shining behind them like a torchlight behind a screen), he'd found a baby.

He had put it into his cloak, he had witnessed the first helter-skelter words tumble around teeth the size of pebbles. He had watched the boy tilt his face upwards to watermark his skin with that leery sky of their country, and the clothes he had provided loft upwards and outwards in air flow from their nation sea.

That man who had picked up a child like one might have picked up a stick from the forest floor, fancying that it could be of some use, was privy to his own mind. He had met the boy and his caprices--all youth were capricious, it was not his fault--with passion and dispassion. The passion was all for himself, reliving the euphoria of coming into knowledge, the divinity of Aristotle and Shakespeare, by passing it onto the boy for the first time as the wide-eyed thing chewed on his thumb, weaning himself off of sucking it.

The dispassion was more natural, letting him toddle, short-legged and babble-mouthed, to all corners of the cities they passed through. He was very inquisitive, in a way wiser and more permanent than the usual nosiness of little ones, and the old man who could tell that thought that was just as well, and good, and marked it to be something promising for the future.

But for now, the boy was too young and could say nothing of worth back to all the wise men's words his shepherd poured into his mind, and the man did not like that. He did not begrudge it of the boy, because he was just a boy, of course, but of things like being a boy and needing amusement, the man did not bother himself. He let his foundling wander into stalls and through dirty alleys and did not miss him, trusting in the child's nesting instinct to draw him just close enough for them to never be truly separated.

As he was simply a human who could not help it, the boy grew. His face became a man's, and so, his voice. The eyes of those he caught in the markets no longer saw his brains to be a vacuous, undecipherable space, so entitling him to unthinking, simple kindness. That was a free pass only given to children. Those who heard his words put them in their own thoughts and shaped answers. The image of his appearance and their guesses on his soul became etched upon their memories.

That was then the baby the man found became dangerous in the way that all adults were dangerous, and then that the man decided to keep him closer. It was good, because now the boy knew how to speak, not just how to be spoken to. He was lively and bright and a little pretentiously self-assured of his revelations, as those who are young and smart tend to be. It entertained the man a great deal.

The boy's style of intelligence was very different from his teacher's. He saw the world in perfect snapshots. He was gifted with a photographic/sound recorder memory, and did not have to doubt his truth because he could recall every detail of it. The only impression he needed was his first, and that was enough to keep him from being wrong. There were no lapses. The man however, although he was very clever at it, could only see a few dots at a time and connect them, and the dots had a way of only coming in pixel by pixel.

And the man quickly found that it broke his heart.

His own brilliance made the dots come together, which made him realize, you now see this boy as your son. The fact that he is in name merely your successor makes it all the more achingly clear, because a son would have been whom you wanted to inherit all the things you like the most. And of all things, the man likes brilliance--lonely, luminous brilliance. And the boy has it.

It breaks his heart.

For the man, being a scholar, it has become a blasted recursive thing of needing to reinterpret all that pragmatic feeding and washing and telling the boy stories to get him to sleep when he was young as something other than pragmatic. Though the man knew he hadn't really cared about the boy until the boy had had his own mind, and that hadn't happened until only very recently, he could not be as good as the boy, who could see the world in snapshots. The man's school of thought took facts and ordered them to a brand of understanding he considered to be the right way.

For now, that was how a parent loved his child. And that, he supposed, was why he was old--his ways old-fashioned and obsolete compared to the younger generation's, even though he had instructed the younger generation. As that was how it should go between a father and his grown son.

And that was why his heart broke when he walked into the boy's room in their first real house, an old tower, to find the boy collapsed beside his bed. His body was crumpled, his arms on the mattress and the air was filled with the silence of his crying. With the noisy persona stripped, all that was left was deep sorrow.

The old man put a wrinkled hand on the boy's shoulder. He knew that it would destroy him to see the boy lift his face, to see smooth skin he himself has not had in decades, stung red and sticky by burning salt tears.

The man does so anyways, and another dot is jotted down.

Snapshots are unchangeable. The boy cries because he has seemingly met every tragic, noble beauty in the world, all of whom greedily prod the boy's soul. It cracks under their weight of their need to love it.

They torture him. With gentle half-closed eyes of an a weary orphan who once willed himself to cross over the bridge of death back to life, just to come back to the boy's grasping hands that held a playing card as tightly as would have his friend's dead body if only he had been allowed.

With the weeping eyes of a girl that had fallen away from him into the darkness in a whirl of hair she did not return with, and fed his hands the drink of a recognition so deep that that it had overflowed onto his arms as he cradled her in a embrace dearer to her than the protection of her supernatural cocoon.

With sheepish sulky slanted eyes of a friend that floated, embarrassed, above a battered body that was most damaged in the ink leaking around the chest muscle, but shifting an injured comrade to the side to take a congratulatory grab even though he normally would have killed anyone who touched him.

The boy can not stop crying from how much pain comes from having the collection build up and stare at him. Having them is the only way he can understand things. A little more than living in the snapshots, he wants to understand things. The fight to stop thinking he is in the pictures, to think of himself as just taking them, makes him think he is failing at understanding. The man feels the pride of a master, that the boy is working so hard to deserve his post.

The boy looks at him, in the same obliviousness that all children have in that they do not see that their grief tears at their parents enough to drive them mad. And he says, naively:

"Hey Gramps…all you have to do is live forever. Just live forever…and be the real Bookman… I'll just stay an apprentice, so all this…this will be okay…can't you do that? Please…?" his voice shakes.

Bookman gently places a hand on Lavi's head. "Lavi." he said gravely. "You must not say that. Don't misunderstand. You are a far better Bookman than I."

Lavi has his snapshots, sharp and precise. The very nature of his intelligence forces him to see the world as it stands. He will make the right choice. But without words, without confession, without struggle, Bookman has let his dots connect into a picture, one that he should not have. While breaking it, Lavi makes it clearer.

Adding a dot for every tear.

Frames for Panes

He could only build the most beautiful frame he could for a window he was too scared to look through.

It belonged to his sister, his baby. The only baby he could ever have. Even when she was young, she was always ready to ask about all the unsolvable horrors of the world. Why did some of the glint-husked fish in the pond shun their golden scales to lie on their turgid white bellies in the winter, to match the snow clods skimming the water? Why did children dig dingy dens out of trash piles to live in, with the gutter runoff buoying rotten refuse past their noses?

Why did her little voice catch itself in her mouth to her parents' sad smiling faces, so that all she could say was "I'm sorry," which made them leave her without even attempted wrong answers?

That was why she was a baby, his baby. They did not know how to do it--have her come to them with the right kind of sorry, of outreached pleading hands and dripping eyes that she felt would stop up and heal over if only she could determinedly smash them into his shoulder and rub. And all that misplaced clarity would overflow into something childishly right like a tantrum as she chanted her mantra of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Sorry to be so weak that she got frustrated with ugly things instead of ignoring them altogether.

Their parents, really his parents and not really his sister's parents, had loved her, but they had not expected her. That was why he loved her. That was he was the one who babied her, because he was the only one who could. Of course, it was a beautiful and sad thing both and her brother didn't really want it gone-- so he would simply smooth the back of her head and start building a lovely picture out of it.

Sh, sh, it's fine isn't it? You and me--we will be heroes, he'd insisted. The yawning openings of his tunic sleeves would lay bare the white of his capable arms against her skin. What do you think I'm studying so hard for? Who do you think I am? When I'm good enough, you'll still tell me all things that are hard and wrong, won't you? I will always know. I will always help you fix them.

She had nodded, making the wise decision to wait for him to grow up. Why had it been so easy to make an empty promise just to tease a smile out of her, like it was justified by ending the vexing squeeze in the center of his chest? She was his baby, but he was not a real adult; not like his parents, who had preferred awkwardness to lying. She was right and they hadn't been able to do anything about it. So, maturely, they had had to leave her alone.

Her brother had caved, and it didn't occur to him that one day even he would walk past her window: the beautiful, sad thing of him not really believing those noble words about himself, and her, and their noble together someday. He hadn't mean them and he didn't have to. He was only getting his baby to stop crying.

The day of her realizing his lie doesn't come to pass because he really has to do it and it stops being a lie. Before the days of the two adopting the western convention of referring to one's own family by first name, brother and sister had literally been pulled apart. Officious men dressed in black had restrained the brother while other officious men in black had roughly towed off the sister by her thin wrist.

"Little sister!" he had screamed, stumbling free. In his misstep he missed her worried expression disappearing behind the slam of a carriage door. "Little sister!," he kept screaming, to the chagrin of his holders. And to himself, my baby, my baby!

It was the closest he ever came to being forced to gaze over the sill and through her pane of things both wonderful and horrible. The honest to god truth was that they really were taking her away to be a hero and do something about the world on the other side she was so anxious about. There were big, dark dangerous things in the world that wouldn't become better by themselves just by sister and brother reuniting.

But ultimately, because he was who he was, the brother missed the point entirely.

After calming down, the brother got to work, thinking hard about what little they had told him. Her world. His baby's sad world, wherever she was. He would find her, and stay with her, and…it would all be okay, not matter how terrified her abductors had seemed in describing their own reality. He only needed to reframe it, make it beautiful, and then she wouldn't have to be scared anymore. Then he wouldn't have to feel unending pain over the possibility of her being scared.

And his lie became true and the frame became more important than the window. It turned out that there was an office custom-made to battle evils like the ones that would spook his sister, and all without ever needing to see the face of evil itself. It was not that hard at all to seize it for himself, and the brother was delighted to know that if hadn't been for the ropes tying her down, his sister would wept on his neck like she used to.

Even so, the simple peace of always knowing his sister's whereabouts frayed--fast The brother was careless. When he hadn't been paying attention, he suddenly found himself not just one baby, but hundreds and hundreds. Babies that smoked cigarettes and had full grown beards and deep-throated laughs and their own children back at home. They wore lab coats to look smart and sleek or floppy white suits to block the radiation of anti-akuma shields or reinforced black leather trench coats to deflect deadly, deadly stars.

His sister, she would always be the most important one of course, and nobody else could move him to the same level of concern he held over her--but, but, there were suddenly so many of them. When any of them were out on missions he got to a lesser degree the same discomforting dread he felt when he saw his own baby sister's troubled face, in realizing that there might be something wrong.

And they, just like her, had their own panes whose contents they grimly scrutinized. There is a child with hair white from shock and a curse, who kills akuma to kill his father over and over again because he always remembers the whispered "I love you" of the monster imploding under his son's merciless fist.

There is a man who is held fast to death by a tattoo and an achingly lovely plant in his room that blooms more fully than the man himself, even though the purity of his hatred tunes him into a more willing, more graceful, and more mechanical killer than anything their imaginations could make up.

There is a boy who can never take his eyes off of a world he can't have, because of the complete relief he feels in a moment's diversion will tempt him to run away forever, and he can't do that, because although it makes him miserable, observation is his strength, and he treasures it.

His sister had said it best when she was still in the throes of awe at his arrival. Her eyes, not on him but on the ceiling, wide and hypnotized. In a sloppy, shivering mess, her mouth had formed words full of enough surprise and untruth to make him want to spit: "For the first time, it felt like I was looking into a mirror!"

It made her brother shudder and know, with absolute devastation, that many of his babies were the same; unable to stop what existed outside the pane from inviting itself in and making them think that it was a part of them. There were too many that marched before him with the same blank face that his sister sometimes made when her pane held her in its thrall with an especial cruelty, like another exorcist's death.

And so he steeled himself. He cheered the Order as much as possible, belying his own IQ with stupid acts to kept them in hysterics-- like making faces to a giggling infant. He swore to protect them with his support. Slowly, for all them, their window of nasty, difficult things was getting encircled by his beautiful frame.

His sister was the only one strong enough to peer right through the glass, even leaning forward to touch it if she could. She would recognize the tarot card of calamity in her view: a tower prophetically struck to bits, its watchmen thrown from its scattered walls amidst bolts of wrathful lightening--their long, black coats catching fire. She'd turn to him and start telling him as he kept constructing the frame around her, and them, but he would shake his head no, no, he never saw it.

As he hums and builds, Lenalee passes the time. She waits for Komui to grow up and finally take a look, so he can watch the world fall apart by her side.

Stories Aren't Comedies

His had to tell his fairytales in a way that his son would believe them forever.

They had started that way. The iron curlicues of the street-lamp had left fanciful marks on his thin face, making the ragged thing look like thrown-out marionette, or clown too sad to perform but had forgotten to take off his make-up. His self-designated father had knelt by the child, too dull and tired to be skittish, and securely enfolded him in his wool coat. The man had picked him up like a lost prince being rescued from a curse-- baggy skin, pointy bones, monstrous deformity, and all. And that was how their story began.

His son was the kindest, least duplicitous child in the world. He grew up sweet and naïve, touchingly thrilled with every natural gift that God gave him. With every year that passed, he and his father seemed to discover another thing about him that made life even happier. It was discovered at the age of three that he could sing as brightly as a woodland bird; he was especially fond of bouncy ditties. At five he was doing daredevil stunts on the tips of his toes on the thinnest, most knotted tree branches, which translated easily to balancing on the tops of balls. He absorbed every trick and riddle and acrobatic fancy his father taught him.

And so their charmed life was complete as it naturally evolved into that of street performers. His son's life was colored with costumes and frolicking traveling companions that they joined with from time to time. A day didn't go by without the child laughing with his whole heart. It was like his boy had a bevy of invisible fairies trading wishes for every smile, tapping their wands on his auburn crown to give him a new magical talent on each birthday. Or Christmas. It was the same day. If they needed even one more thing to ensure that the boy's life was rife with pretty blessings, that would be it.

He was happy, very happy--and he adored, worshipped his father. The man had been so good-hearted as to see a son in the dirty little urchin stranger. The boy was fairly intelligent and had been through enough on the street to understand that if not entirely bad, people, at best, could only be both good and bad. But his father was not a person; he was a father, his father, a parent. He was the sole exception.

His father kept a close eye on him. He approved of his son living a rose-colored life. They were poor but content, innocently indulging in songs and dances, cartwheels and flips, magic and parlor tricks. The man loved his adopted son as dearly as his son loved him, but he felt terrible guilt sometimes.

His cherished his son of course, but on the side his father knew that giving the child happiness was making him the perfect blank slate stock protagonist. The impression of early bliss would be strong in his son. It would be the prologue he would always try to return to, but of course he wouldn't be able to because it would not be his real story.

No, his son would be like any other main character in a story. He would bask, naïve and incomplete and protected by guardian forces in the beginning, such as those who loved him. Then something terrible, something heart-breaking, would tear it away from him; it would most likely be something evil. It was then he would embark on his journey, learning how to be strong and fight this enemy. His shrewd deceits would be made possible by his natural-born talents, which he had only used for revelry before.

And why? In defense of the happiness he had had, of course. It would be gone for him, but he would remember. And from there would come the sense of justice every hero needed. There was something…something horrible…something horrible in the world that made tragedies like dispelling a whole battery on enchantments that made a happy life possible. His son would want to save people. He would want to protect what he couldn't keep for himself, driven by righteous anger. The father knew it.

And that was why he knew he had to do what he had to do. Cast his own son as the player in God's own play of the final battle. A Faust deal in reverse.

His son's soul, already contracted to God through the will of the father. His small hand sparkled with the embedded promise as he busily scratched figures into the dust. He was fairly good at drawing and would take off his mitten to frantically scrawl the story his father sang to him in a deep tenor. The cross stuck in the gouged-out groove splashed faint light as he moved. The glow circled as the boy's wrist swerved to outline a face, left a trailing curved line as he swept down to leave a nose. It stalled as he dimpled the moon in his sky for craters. He made his character climb up to the stars on a ladder of notes his father's song built.

Giggling, he passed the sharpened stick to his father with his scarlet paw whenever his father trailed off. Then the child picked up on the loose end and would send his voice soaring, clear and melodious to craft a new adventure for the "boy". The score was coming into being. The boy didn't know, but one day in the climax, amidst flood and storm, he would soothe the Armageddon with his lullaby. This would be his story.

The story failed.

Wide-eyed and disbelieving, the boy stood stock still and white-faced before his father's disgust. The father despaired, enough to want to turn back time and strip his coat off the wretched orphan, kick him back to the gutter and leave him to freeze. He cried his frustration and made his son shrink away from him. Such a repulsive, weakling child. The father's grief cut him deep--it was the sickening pain of a parent realizing that his child was a wayward one. It was fury, it was disappointment that made him lift his sickle of a hand. For the first time and in death, he raised his hand against his child and struck him for his wickedness.

His son had succumbed to an easy solution like the lazy brothers, the vain sisters. The good child, his good child, that he had recognized by the holy mark twinkling brightly on a snowy Christmas day. The boy had not traveled to the ends to the earth to recover his father's soul. He had not spilled blood with every step, or accepted the gently harsh conditions of angels, or asked the wind and moon and sun for guidance. He had not stood before the gates of heaven, only to be too wise from his trials to drag his father's peaceful spirit across. He was supposed to weep before the golden doors when he spied his father's loving face on the other side, and bid him an understanding farewell with a heartfelt smile.

But his son had not done those things. He had thrown a tantrum, bitterly hated the world and its unfair God, bargained with a dealer of souls that gleefully ignored their sacredness. His son had been a stupid, greedy fool like the heroes that failed, and for that his father would not forgive him. Unaware and uncaring that they were now blades, he brought his fists down on his son's head again and again, thumping him soundly for his naughty sloth, his dunce-like sin. The screams he heard seemed to only be a petulant protest against punishment. The tears on the young face were out of sulky temper at being caught, not true repentance.

Why did his son not see the world as it was? That selfish love only rotted the one it held captive? It was horrible, his son was so horrible. His father wanted him to suffer from seeing the consequences the stupid characters forced upon the good with their avarice.

It stunned the father that his son, as much of a wretched thing he had become, had the audacity to strike him back. He felt his skeletal body get thrown to the side with a rattle that broke him into pieces. He lifted his head to see a hideous wriggling claw throw itself over his head like a murderous umbrella. Through the gaps of its spokes, the father saw his son's expression, run wet and dark with blood. His screams were thin and high and shattering, falling away from his bird-song voice into something ugly:

"Leave Mana alone! Father! Father, run!"

Too late, Mana realized that Allen had chosen a different kind of story. He did not mind becoming a monster, or his father becoming a monster, or them being monsters together. Allen's heart was darker and far more beautiful than he had ever given it credit for. He liked dark comedies better than fairytales. For that, Mana could love his son. And he told him so.

Once there was a child and his father, and they were always happy. But that was no proper story. That was only the story of the boy and his father, and it ended. That was the role of a parent, after all. The father's most important mission was to send the boy off on his own.

Author's Notes:

Theme 1: Parent-child relationships (all of which aren't completely natural)

Theme 2: The way in which the world is beheld

Theme 3: With this, I will stop writing Lavi as an angst-ridden sod, Komui as creepy and deluded, and Allen through fairytale allegories.

Theme 4: The mixed tenses are intentional, not bad grammar. To, um, represent the very tenuous balance of past childhood and present adulthood in the parent-child relationship. Kinda. (LIE)

Theme Four: Fcking myself in the EYE for letting this delay writing my term paper/studying for finals. But I like it, so whatever. (The fic, not the eye-fck.)


End file.
